Organic electronic devices are used in various applications today. One of the applications that benefit from organic materials is the display application. Displays made with organic materials are useful for battery-powered, portable electronic devices (e.g., cell phones, personal digital assistants, handheld personal computers, and DVD players) and also for desktop or wall-mounted television screens and computer monitors. The displays for these applications may require high information content, full color (FC), fast video rate response, low power consumption, in addition to use in smaller size devices.
Electronic devices, such as an organic light emitting diode (OLED), which typically includes a layered structure formed on a substrate and an encapsulation cap that encloses the layers, may be used in the above displays. The multi-layered structure contains a layer with a driver circuit, including layers with electrical components (e.g., electrodes) and at least one layer that contains an organic active material. As the layers may be sensitive to environmental elements such as moisture, dust, and oxygen, an encapsulation cap may be used to enclose and protect the layers from these elements.
Various lid designs and sealing techniques have been experimented with to encapsulate the layers of the device. One of the limitations is that both anode output leads and cathode output leads are required in order to terminate on one side of the display, and in order to use a single connector to form electrical connections with the peripheral drive circuitry. In a device where the anodes are formed before the cathodes, the cathode output leads are typically routed around the periphery of the display array to the side of the substrate where the anode leads are formed (or vice versa when the cathodes are formed before the anodes). The routed leads take up a large area on the substrate and undesirably increase the overall display panel size. In addition to the increase in size, the routing of the leads results in other undesirable effects such as an increased resistance in the longer leads and a greater resistance difference between leads as a result of their different lengths. The increase in resistance is exacerbated by the fact that some leads are routed through areas that receive laser ablation and can be damaged during the laser ablation process.
There remains a need for an organic electronic device that has an environmental protection structure that allows for the termination of the anode output leads and the cathode output leads on the same side of the device.